Professional Documents
Culture Documents
K. Browne, D.P. Jackson, L.Q. English, Brett Pearson, and Hans Pfister
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 17013, USA
This document is intended as an outline for writing scientific papers. It contains all of the important sections that should be included
in a scientific paper, as well as descriptions of what should be included in each of these sections. It also contains some useful tips on
how to use Microsoft Word to write scientific papers. The easiest way to use this document is as a template, inserting your text and
figures as described below. This section is the abstract. It contains a brief description of the project including a relevant description
of the problem, data collection procedures and a summary of results, as well as a few pointers on how this information fits into the
overall field. The abstract may contain equations such as E E0 cos( k r t ) , but inline equations in Microsoft Word don‟t
look very good. An abstract is usually quite short. Often, the length is limited to between 200 and 400 words.
*Kurt.Hubner@cern.ch
Nov. 2009 Scientific Paper Template for Dickinson College Physics Majors pg. 2
II. THEORY
Often, if the theory needed to understand a paper is
somewhat extensive, a separate section containing a
development of the theory will be presented. This section
should contain enough theoretical detail to make it possible
for a member of your target audience to be able to reproduce
any results you rely on later in the paper. Obviously, the
amount of detail that you include will depend on space
constraints and the expected level of expertise of your
audience.
In the context of a paper written by an undergraduate for a
class, you should include all non-obvious steps in derivation
and be sure to reference material that is not “common Figure 1 : A capacitor and battery circuit diagram.
knowledge.” If you just learned the material in a class, you (Notice no title in the figure.)
might want to include references to the source of the basic
derivation. If you start with a non-trivial expression that you Any diagram you include should contain a fairly detailed
had to look up somewhere, either in a book, a paper, or your figure caption. A good rule of thumb is that if someone
notes, you should include a citation and reference. reads the abstract and looks at all the figures and captions,
All equations should be incorporated into the text using a they should have a reasonable idea what your paper is about.
program designed to properly format equations. LaTex, While this isn‟t always possible, it is a good goal to have.
MathType, and MS Equation Editor are common programs. (That said, this document does not even come close to
You can insert equations easily into a document using MS meeting that requirement, but it also is not so much a
Equation Editor. It is not the best, or the prettiest, but it scientific paper as a how-to manual on writing one.)
works. Putting in equation numbers is not natural for Word, As mentioned before, you should include enough
so this template contains a simple macro to do this. If you information in your experimental design to make it possible
have MathType, it works better, so use it. Below is an for someone else to reproduce your experiment. You should
example of how equations and their numbers should appear. generally outline what you did with enough detail so that it
is clear how you set up your experiment, what types of
E E0 cos(k r t ) (1) instrumentation were involved (detailed make and model
numbers are not required), and how you collected your data.
B B0 cos( k r t ) (2)
Never use ordinary script for any equation, whether inline or IV. RESULTS
numbered.
Your paper should contain a section describing/presenting
your raw results. Often you will be able to do this by
including graphs and/or tables of data. This data should
III. EXPERIMENTAL METHODS
generally not be heavily processed. Rather, one should
This section is often called experimental design or include results in formats that are good representations of the
methods. It contains information about the experimental data obtained by your experiment or computation. You will
setup, design, instrumentation and procedure. The main have a chance to show processed results in the analysis
purpose of this section is to convince your reader that your section, but in this section you need to present the reader
experimental methods were sound and thorough. If you do with your raw data so he/she can clearly judge the quality of
not clearly report your experimental methods, you run the your analysis and conclusions. It is your responsibility to
risk of having someone else repeat your experiment and get estimate experimental error/uncertainty.
different results. (This then brings into question the validity Often you have far too much data to include it all. In this
of your conclusions and your reputation as a scientist.) case, you will include a sample of your raw data with tables
Often you will include a diagram of the experimental or graphs containing straightforward compilations of this
setup. An example is shown below. Diagrams can be drawn data. It is very typical that only a small fraction of the data
using any software you are familiar with and imported into you have collected shows up explicitly in the paper.
Word. If the diagram is particularly simple, you can even use Below is another figure. It is generally best to make all
Word itself to draw it. figures of single-column width (unless your paper is single-
column). When they are inline, it is very easy to locate them
with respect to text [3]. You may still have to do some
fiddling at the end to get them exactly where you want them,
but once you put them somewhere, they stay put with respect
to the text.
Nov. 2009 Scientific Paper Template for Dickinson College Physics Students pg. 3
VIII. REFERENCES (THIS WILLTYPICALLY NOT Common problems include moving figures around when
BE A SEPARATE, NUMBERED SECTION IN other text is moved. To avoid this, always put figures and
YOUR PAPER.) captions inline, rather than as overlays. Never use wrapping
with figures. It almost always causes problems [2].
You must include a references section in any scientific Using „styles‟ can be key to uniform document formatting.
paper. To omit the references section is to almost certainly It allows you to think about your writing instead of the
commit plagiarism. As mentioned before, you should formatting. The style menu is straightforward to use: just
include references whenever you have used information select some text and choose the appropriate style from the
from another source. This might be a professor‟s notes or a style selection box.
textbook. As you advance in your studies, your references It‟s generally a bad idea to force page breaks, but
will increasingly come from journal articles, since these sometimes it is necessary. You will notice that there is a
articles generally present more recent results. Direct section break at the end of the references section. At section
quotations are to be absolutely avoided; instead paraphrase breaks, you can change the formatting/page layout. For
your source. example, this document is set up with two columns in the
The following few sections are generally not included in a standard journal style, but you can change this style to
paper, but are placed here to help you work with MS Word. single-column, double-spaced very easily. You can define
If you read them carefully and use this document as a different sections of your document to have different column
template, you will almost certainly save yourself a lot of properties, but you cannot mix column properties within a
pain and suffering associated with formatting documents. single section.
Better yet, learn to use LaTex. It is installed on all the
Macintosh machines and generates beautiful output with a REFERENCES
minimum of fussing over formatting, although some new
syntax must be learned in the process. (Still, it is highly [1] I. Newton, “Apples Hurt when they Hit you in the
recommended that you eventually learn to use LaTex. That Head,” Journal of Fruit Dynamics (1521), 21(3),
said, you can usually get by with MS Word unless you have 321.
a large number of mathematical formulas.) The following [2] W. Tell, I. Newton, “Arrows Hurt more than
few tips will help make your life with MS Word more Apples,” Private Communication.
bearable. [3] R Feynman, M. Fandango, “Quantum Interactions
between Apples and Arrows: A Diagrammatic
IX. AVOIDING UNEXPECTED BEHAVIORS Approach,” http://www.fruitdiagrams.org.
[4] C. Ape, “Learning to Climb like a Monkey,”
Many of the problems people have working with MS Primate Dynamics (2001), 4(10), 57-69.
Word stem from its broad functionality. When using MS [5] K. Kong, “Learning to Club like a Gorilla,” Journal
Word, it is very easy to get confused because it is doing of Newtonian Mechanics and Ape Behavior, 12(3),
something automatically of which you are unaware. 125-130 (2003).